Theater Review
Pier Gynt lies, steals, cheats and abandons the women who love him, but it is hard to believe his mother when she calls him lazy.
After all, she has to chase him back and forth, over crates and up into the balcony just to get him to listen.
Pier Gynt has plenty of energy — enough to keep him scheming for 70 years, and still kicking as the end closes in.
The play “Pier Gynt” — an ambitious, Eastport version of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” — has that kind of energy, too, enough to keep members of the audience laughing for nearly four hours and leave them crying at the end, without losing too many along the way.
“Pier Gynt” is a joint venture of Cornerstone Theater and the people of Eastport. Cornerstone is a small group of professionals based in Virginia who set up shop every few months in a different small town, working with local people to put together a show.
When Cornerstone came to Maine, Eastport, Pleasant Point and the surrounding community responded with vigor. More than 85 amateurs tried out for “Pier Gynt,” and half of them were included in the cast. Others directed their energy backstage.
The result is theater that bursts onto the stage, and sometimes tumbles out into the audience.
The Eastport Gallery and Arts Center, in hosting the production, makes good use of the old Masonic Hall’s unusual dimensions, putting the audience on steep wooden risers to either side of the “stage.” The actors use every available inch of floor space, as well as the aisles, two balconies, a landing at eye-level and what must be a maze of backstage passages.
With this jungle gym of a set at their disposal, the actors give free reign to the fire that director Bill Rauch set in them. Cornerstone’s Christopher Moore, as Pier, vaults around the stage for nearly the entire play, seldom slowing down, and never running short of new ways to present the many faces of Pier.
But the fire is not limited to the professionals. Pleasant Point’s Deanna Francis, as Pier’s mother, matches Moore jab for shove, tumble for tussle. Her frustration with her wayward son lights each of her moods with at least a touch of fury — fury that dominates her scenes and rivets the audience.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the show is the music, provided by a three-piece pit band and singer. From rollicking gospel numbers to the haunting echoes of a deserted woman’s song, the music played out the emotions of the show on yet another level.
The rewritten script tries to mesh a series of Down East jokes with glimpses of other worlds and the story of one man’s long life. Written mostly in verse, the story bounces through a rich, two-hour first act.
But the attempt to fit the remaining 50 years of Pier Gynt’s life into the second act results in some inexplicable scenes — including one where Pier becomes “president” of a mental hospital, and inadvertantly kills a few people. The resonance of the first act disappears; in short, the script is one hour too long.
At Sunday’s matinee, however, an crowd of 90 — many of whom wept as the lights came up — left little doubt that they thought the show was worth the time.
And as a demonstration of the power live theater can wield, compared to the two-dimensional world of video, “Pier Gynt” put on an explosive show — perhaps the spark Eastport’s community theater supporters were looking for.
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